Common misconceptions: ‘The State and religion are separate…’

             A confused atheist wondering why religion ought to be excluded from the public sphere…

Occasionally I’ll pick up some ideas that are regularly trotted out against Catholics as obvious truths which are nothing of the sort.

One you’ll often hear is that, ‘The State and religion are separate.’ This is then used to justify ignoring Catholic bishops or just anyone religious on the ground of violating this obvious constitutional principle. Part of the background to this is half remembered truth that the US Constitution guarantees in the Bill of Rights that, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ Quite apart from the fact that the interpretation of this clause has been subject to huge and ongoing debate, with many important issues only settled in the twentieth century by the Supreme Court and many still outstanding, that’s all very nice for the Americans but of absolutely no relevance to Europeans. For both of these reasons, separation of church/religion and state in Scotland and the UK cannot be taken to be a self-evident good.

The claim, ‘The State and religion are separate’ is very confused, and to the extent that it’s not confused, it’s false. It’s often trotted out as a variant on, ‘The Church and State are separate’. The first thing to note here are that the claims are very different. As separate institutions, with separate chains of authority and separate responsibilities, the (Catholic) Church and the State are always, to some extent, separate: the Vatican is never going to be running the Strathclyde Police; the Police (one hopes) are never going to be running Masses. And this holds even for the most Catholic, most mediaeval State. Now precisely what the relationship is to be between these two separate institutions is a much more complex matter, and one that has taken up some of the finest minds in Christian history. But, on any analysis, whilst the institutions are separate, it does not follow that they necessarily have no connections: even the local bowling club may have connections with the state, say, through tax breaks or being consulted with in planning health campaigns. So to note that the State and the Church are separate is not to admit that they are not connected; and the precise nature of that connection is up for debate, not something to be assumed as, in principle, non-existent.

Putting aside the special (legally recognized) position of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland as Scotland’s national Church, even from a non-Catholic point of view, as far as the Catholic Church in Scotland is concerned, there is no reason why the State shouldn’t listen to the Church: the Church is perfectly free to make whatever representations it wants, and the State is perfectly free to make of them what it wants. It cannot be assumed that the Catholic Church should be excluded from public deliberation, even if it does not have the legally guaranteed status given to the Church of Scotland.

So much for the claim that the Church and State are separate. What then of the claim that religion and the State are separate?

It’s hard to know quite what to make of such a muddled claim. What some atheists would like it to mean is that anything to do with religion is excluded from the public sphere. If you thought that ‘religious’ was equivalent to ‘obviously barking mad nonsense’ (as many atheists seem to), this would be a fair request. But of course, it isn’t clear (even to non-Catholics) that everything which is in any sense religious is ‘barking mad nonsense’. Remember that a majority of Scots in the 2001 census described themselves as belonging to a religion: whatever looseness of connection that description may cover, it certainly means that some reference to religious beliefs will be accepted as persuasive in public discourse.

Moreover, the term ‘religious’ is itself notoriously difficult to define. If it meant ‘anything coming from a person who is religious’ then effectively the majority of the population would be disenfranchised. If it meant ‘relying on specifically religious terms such as God’ then Catholic moral teaching, based on natural law, would not be excluded. Atheists who advocate the exclusion of religion from the public sphere need to be pressed on what they mean by such a claim. (When pressed, in my experience, they simply mean that ‘anything I think is rubbish’ should be excluded. Unfortunately, they rarely seem sensitive to the problems of such a test.)  In any case, whilst atheists might like religious beliefs in some (rather unclear) sense to be excluded, that is a case that they have to make rather than assume.

What does all this mean?

• There is no reason in principle why the Scottish or UK government shouldn’t listen to religious views or spokesmen.
• There is no reason in principle why those views shouldn’t rely on clearly religious language in making their point.
• It is, however, a matter for prudential judgment how the Catholic Church makes its point as persuasively as possible: the State (and its citizens) may listen, but (from a non-Catholic point of view) it is under no obligation to listen. This might suggest that, prudentially, the Church –at least on some occasions- should express itself as far as possible in Scotland in terms that a (largely secularized, largely post-Protestant and religiously poorly informed) public will accept.

Probably a matter again for another day, but the Italian Crucifix case in the European Court of Human Rights which came out in March (here) is well worth paying attention to. The broad point decided on here was that whilst European states had an obligation to allow individuals religious freedom, there was no obligation on a State to do this on the basis of excluding all religions from the public sphere (the idea of hard secularism) rather than (say) having a State religion which allowed individuals to opt out.

 The video is well worth watching. Joseph Weiler (the Jewish professor of law) who argued this case successfully and extremely movingly reminds us (and this is too easily forgotten) that toleration and religious co-existence in Western Europe have not historically been achieved by the exclusion of religion (or indeed the Church) from the public sphere, but by how Church and State have behaved in exercising that relationship. The point that the US separation of church and state or the French model of laicité are not the only or indeed typical European ways of resolving the need for religious toleration is particularly worth stressing.

Falconer's brave new world and the Stoics

           A modern medical practitioner on a house call as envisaged by Lord Falconer

Lord Falconer's Commission on Assisted Dying has finally produced its report. It apparently (and unsurprisingly) has concluded that allowing doctors to provide patients with the means of killing themselves is a good thing.

Although the 'Commission' itself is a joke -it is a commission only in the sense that my asking a few Catholic mates at the pub what they think of euthanasia is a 'Commission' (for the record, having seriously deliberated for thirty seconds, we can report that we are all against it)- it doubtless marks the beginning of a new round of the attempt to turn doctors into versions of the executioners dressed as Charon who dispatched the fallen in gladiatorial games (see photo above).

More to say on all this in the future no doubt. But for the moment, it reminds me of a point that keeps coming back to me in this area. The Stoics are often (rightly) pointed to as an ancient philosophical school which favoured suicide in some circumstances. Moreover, modern proponents of euthanasia often base their arguments on the value of autonomy which -with some caveats- is also rightly to be seen as the basis for the Stoic position.

But the modern supporters of euthanasia miss the point that assisted suicide or having a doctor kill you is a very poor illustration of autonomy. The Stoic suicide is a dramatic enactment of the sage's indifference to death or pain. Indeed, the Stoics emphasized how easy it was to die once you'd made your mind up to do so:

Cleanthes for example killed himself thus:

And he died in the following manner. His gums swelled very much; and, at the command of his physicians, he abstained from food for two days. And he got so well that his physicians allowed him to return to all his former habits; but he refused, and saying that he had now already gone part of the way, he abstained from food for the future, and so died; being, as some report, eighty years old, and having been a pupil of Zeno nineteen years.

Zeno (the founder of Stoicism) was even more self-controlled:

The manner of his death was as follows. As he was leaving the school he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Striking the ground with his fist, he quoted the line ...:

'I come, I come, why dost thou call for me?'

and died on the spot through holding his breath.

Instead of these actions which dramatically embody the Stoic virtues of courage, self-control and indifference to the views of those who are not wise, we have commissions, 'eligibility criteria' and 'comprehensive sets of safeguards' (see here for all this). 

I am not a Stoic. As a Catholic, I believe that, whilst the value autonomy has its place in ethics, that place is strictly limited by the overarching context of our dependence on God (and, moreover, I would argue that a natural human dependency and the values consequent on that should be evident to non-Catholics, even atheists). But one of the constant threads of this blog is that serious consideration of the Graeco-Roman philosophical tradition -which provides a model of  natural reason uninfluenced by direct revelation- is a way of engaging modern culture without the sort of obviously religious premises that modern secularists reject. Within that general methodology, the Stoic position provides an interesting critique of modern euthanasia and indeed much of modern liberalism. Instead of the rather rugged autonomy of the ancient world, we have a cod autonomy, the sham of autonomy which is produced by state and medical control. (A similar transformation of autonomy takes place with same sex 'marriage' debate: instead of homosexuals having the freedom of just getting on with their lives, the debate has become about state creation of an institution, and state crushing of dissent.)

I don't think people should commit suicide. If you are reading this and you are thinking of doing so, please rethink your position: human flourishing is generally better displayed by enduring natural harms than by avoiding them. But if you are (wrongly) obsessed with autonomy like the Stoics, then exercise that autonomy. Don't run around trying to get others to give you social approval. Get on with your own lives and your own deaths. 

I don't pretend that autonomy is the only argument used in favour of suicide: relief of suffering is clearly another major reason offered -and the above reflections have little directly to say on that. But as far as autonomy is concerned, the Stoics should remind modern secularists quite how thin many of their ethical approaches are, and how dependent on a view of human beings as simply creatures of the state, whose moral actions have to be endorsed and even acclaimed by others.

Death of Professor Sir Michael Dummett

                                            27 June 1925 – 27 December 2011 RIP

A not unusual, but still unfortunate aspect of holiday periods is that one finds out, on return to the real world, that whilst the merrymaking was in full flight, someone has quietly passed from this world into the next.

The death of Sir Michael Dummett, whilst, given his age, hardly tragic, is the passing of a major English philosopher and a major Catholic intellectual. Obituary from the Scotsman here and an appreciation -and reflections inspired by Dummett's life on the general thinness of modern culture-  by John Haldane here.

He was a convert to Catholicism and was instructed and received into the Church by the Dominicans in Edinburgh.